D game development: a call to action

uri via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Sat Dec 13 15:10:51 PST 2014


On Saturday, 13 December 2014 at 22:49:10 UTC, Joel wrote:
> On Tuesday, 6 August 2013 at 06:23:09 UTC, qznc wrote:
>> On Monday, 5 August 2013 at 18:18:30 UTC, Jonathan A Dunlap 
>> wrote:
>>> I am one of the few who have taken a keen interest in D for 
>>> game development. The concise language and modern 
>>> conveniences may be able to reduce many hours worth of 
>>> development time off a game project, while making the code 
>>> more maintainable. Aside from the core language, Dlang 
>>> graphics bindings have a way to go before even earning 
>>> acceptance in the indie gaming scene, but it's making great 
>>> strides to get there.
>>>
>>> The main challenge I've hit is the lack of any sort of path 
>>> for adopting a media engine. Bindings (like SFML 
>>> https://github.com/krzat/SFML-D) all suffer from:
>>>
>>> A) No information about its current status: this is scary if 
>>> its repo hasn't been updated in months.
>>> B) Usually are complex to get working in a new project 
>>> (manually building or searching for undocumented dependency 
>>> DLLs)
>>> C) Lack practical references and tutorials for "real would 
>>> usage"
>>> e.g. "how to create an OpenGL window" or "how to render a 
>>> triangle"
>>> versus something like "how to load from disk an image texture 
>>> onto a quad and move it around using keyboard events"
>>>
>>> SFML bindings are also in 
>>> https://github.com/aldacron/Derelict3 but I couldn't find a 
>>> scrap of information on how to use it, how to compile 
>>> correctly, or example usage. It's unclear if the library is 
>>> even usable in its current state.
>>>
>>> Please don't take this as blind criticism, but rather a plea 
>>> to action for the community to provide better library 
>>> documentation support for: current lib status, getting 
>>> started adding it, and a general use tutorial/example. If we 
>>> start doing this, it'll make a big impact for other game 
>>> developers who are new to Dlang to adopt the language. Thanks 
>>> for listening!
>>
>> I am using DAllegro 5 for 2D stuff. So far, it went very 
>> smooth.
>> I just use the original documentation.
>>
>> https://github.com/SiegeLord/DAllegro5
>
> Who else uses DAllegro 5? I like it, just can't get it to work 
> on OS X.

I'm also using the Allegro bindings for a project and have run 
into no issues on  Linux. I'm using Dgame on another project on 
and that also works very well.


@SiegeLord: It would be good to get those bindings listed on the 
main Allegro site here:

http://alleg.sourceforge.net/bindings.html
(there is an old listing for Allegro 4 but not 5)

and in their news here if possible:
http://alleg.sourceforge.net/news.html

I believe you just need to send a request to the mailing list 
here:
http://sourceforge.net/p/alleg/mailman/?source=navbar

Cheers
uri


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